Mainly because it'll probably keep you in work
Aged 18 and looking for an investment that'll return far more than the share market, far more than real estate?
Enrol at university and stay there for four years.
An analysis of a quarter of a century of census data released by the Bureau of Statistics reveals extraordinary rates of return for the lost wages and expenses involved in obtaining a four-year degree - all the more so if you are a woman. Read more »
George Washington University: Crash Lab John B. Carnett
Here's where you can learn to blow stuff up, scale 150-foot trees, make toys and catch lightning--all for college credit
Why subject yourself to the dull buzz of fluorescent lights and endless data sets? Play with plastic explosives, dive with jellyfish, or make video games instead! These schools will make you wish class would never end.
Over the years, PopSci has pulled together annual lists of the coolest, funnest college labs, the places where we would like to have spent our youth tinkering, exploring, and learning. Here, we've collected the ultimate list of all the great labs we've ever covered.
The Greens are evidently the devil incarnate when it comes to education, mining and building. Or to be more accurate, they are the devil incarnate to rich private schools, mining magnates and building billionaires.
Their ‘outrageous’ plans to redistribute school spending from rich private schools to poor public schools has got the wealthy complaining and warning parents not to vote Green.
According to Stephen Doherty, the Chief Executive of Christian Schools Australia, speaking on ABC Radio program PM on Wednesday night:
It’s all very well to raise these moral questions about environmental issues but on the questions that matter to Australians about where they can send their kids, whether there’s fair funding, the Greens policies are divisive and would be quite disastrous.
Greens leader Bob Brown reasonably defended the policy as taking from the rich and giving to the poor. But I want to quote from a more remarkable source to defend the Greens – Julia Gillard. Read more »
As Mark foreshadowed, Julia Gillard used her policy launch today to tie together many of the initiatives announced during the campaign into a coherent narrative – promising both security in the present, and a transformative vision of the future. The Prime Minister sought to draw a contrast between Labor’s desire to build on the foundations of a strong economy and Tony Abbott’s backwards looking agenda. Gillard argued that the Coalition was the true threat to the economy, pointing to the Opposition leader’s billion dollar a day spendathon during the campaign. Read more »
The Prime Minister Julia Gillard has announced plans to penalise parents receiving welfare payments who do not ensure their children have a health check at age four.
The aim, she says, is to make sure that when children get to school, they have been checked to see if there is any health complaint that might affect their ability to learn. A re-elected Gillard Government “will tie the provision of the annual supplement in Family Tax Benefit for welfare families to having the appropriate health check for four year old children”.
The AMA has already raised concerns about the lack of evidence to support this approach, and below are two articles by Croakey contributors who have some serious reservations.
Potential for negative consequences
Professor Mark Harris and Dr Elizabeth Denney-Wilson, of the UNSW Research Centre for Primary Health Care and Equity, write: Read more »
Coburg's "Black Hole" - no high school for year 7 students (existing high schools in red - grey schools don't offer full service)
There’s a fascinating struggle going on between the Education Department and residents of Coburg about the need for a new high school in the area (see here and here). Read more »
One of Julia Gillard’s lines about Tony Abbott’s cuts is that the Opposition, if elected, would abolish the Teach Next and Teach for Australia programmes. Yet, whether these two interlinked initiatives are in fact a good thing has not been widely canvassed – they’ve been presented as if they’re obviously and unquestionably that. A lot of us in the education game, though, think that there’s a lot more to being an educator than can be conveyed in eight weeks’ training.
My friend and ACU colleague Rachael Jacobs makes just that point in an op/ed published in the Fairfax papers. You can read it here.
A while back I finished a Masters in history n'stuff. Currently it's not needed in my day-to-day work but learnin' is learnin' and I for one am glad I did it. Even if it was a massive cross to bear and it took me six years to finish it. Hey, it was nearly free thanks to work covering the tuition so it was totally worth doing if only for that.
But, like I said, not needed day-to-day.
Lately however I've been able to use some of what I've learned helping a friend with her studies. It's a good feeling. A pleasing inner glow of goodness. I've got a bit of a Jerry "I am truly great" feeling happening here.
Yay! Read more »
David Cameron claimed on Tuesday that he and his wife Samantha are members of ‘the sharp-elbowed middle classes’. This statement was at the same time an attempt to proclaim his ordinariness and a dig at middle-class values. The Prime Minister was in effect saying that he is much like everyone else while deprecating those whom he regards as pushy.
He told a member of the audience at a PM Direct question and answer session that he wants to protect Sure Start children’s centres, which were set up by the Labour Government, from being colonised by ‘the sharp-elbowed middle classes’ — by which he appears to mean those who try to get the best out of the system. Read more »
Author: Amitendu Palit, NUS
China and India are often perplexing to analysts. One of the best examples of such shared perplexity is over higher education. From the vantage point of western education service providers, China and India are typical cases of being ‘so near, yet so far’.
This need not be the case. Both China and India wish to expand their higher education sector. Both realise that government efforts alone are insufficient to match the growing demand for higher education. And both China and India realise that private initiatives are needed to supplement existing state-led efforts to improve higher education facilities. Read more »
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